Five Times Zero
by Cherry
Summary: A slippery slope, and five lives Cecelia Reyes never ended.


Five Times Zero  
1/1  
  
A slippery slope, and five lives Cecelia Reyes never ended.  
  
Thanks to Ebonbird, for the beta. Archival is my site, anyone with prior permission, and anyone who asks.  
  
R. This is *not* a nice story. It's really not.   
  
*  
  
He is all pain and pastels, a faded ghost of a smile beneath bloodshot eyes. As he stares out the window, the light reflects from his pale (hidescalesarmour) skin. Sends rainbow reflections dancing across the clinically clean walls.  
  
Standing in his doorway, Cecelia tries to find the beauty out the window that has him smiling through the pain. It is winter, and the snow (what little has not been reduced to slush) is stained grey and brown. Plumes of exhaust spew from tailpipes, snake their way up to the faded sky.  
  
"It's beautiful," he says, never once looking over at her. "I know you don't see it, Doctor Reyes. But it is."  
  
Maybe he recognized her footsteps at the door, the rustle of papers as she looked once more at his chart. Maybe he just heard a sound, but she is the only doctor who will work on him, and his mother will not bring his little sister to see him.  
  
"And why is that, Mr. Harrison?" she asks, so that he will not notice how tightly her fingers grasp the clipboard, that the latest round of test results are long past due.  
  
He closes his eyes and sinks back into his pillows. "Because it's alive."  
  
She steps inside and closes the door behind herself. It muffles the shuffle of hospital slippers and ringing phones, until all there is is Andrew's ragged breathing, and the hum of the machines that keep him alive.  
  
"You have dialysis again tomorrow," she says as she checks the connections buried at his elbows and wrists, the wires that lead to the monitors. These are the only places they can get a reading, because the exoskeleton reforming his body shuts out all their best intentions. She replaces the bag of IV fluid at the top of his drip (because the nurses refuse to work on him, too).  
  
No Mercy, they call her, and maybe they are right, but she has always been able to do what she has to do.  
  
She checks his pupils for response to light. As she feared, one still responds normally, but the other remains fully dilated. He catches her wrist with a heavy hand as she tries to pocket the light.  
  
If he had any strength left in him, with his twisted fingers and rock-hard claws he'd be hurting her. If he had any strength, and she wasn't able to feel his situation on such a personal level.  
  
"The... tests," he whispers with faded eyes.  
  
She disengages her wrist, and replaces his hand on the worn and faded blanket. "I don't think..."  
  
"I'm sorry," Andrew sighs with closed eyes. "I didn't mean to touch... You must hate..."  
  
With a sigh, she pushes her braids back. Shakes her head gingerly lays a hand on his, on the lovely, deadly chitin that lights up the room in crystal colours. "It's not --" she can't find a way to say that she can't be tainted by a mutant touch. That the only thing she hates is how his very skin is eating him. Doesn't tell him how close it is that she sits at his bedside, instead of laying shattered between the sheets. "How are you feeling?" she asks instead.  
  
"Like every bone in my body is broken," he says. Somehow find the energy to grin.  
  
She doesn't have anything to say. Fills his glass with water and raises it to his lips, watching the illusion as his reflections dance across the water, as if he drank from a crystal goblet instead of a plastic cup.  
  
"The tests," he says, and won't let her eyes leave his, uneven irises in hollow sockets in a pastel crystal face.  
  
She pushes up and out of her chair. Flips through the charts at the foot of his bed, though she doesn't need to look at them yet again. She knows what they will say. "The exoskeleton is continuing to reshape your body. Your body is continues to fail to adapt."  
  
He nods, the faintest inclination of his head. It sends the rainbows of refracted light dancing. "Let me guess. My internal organs are starting to fail? The tightness I've been feeling in my head is really because my skull is shrinking? I'd give me three weeks."  
  
"Four," Cecelia says. "Five, five and a half at the outside."  
  
"Even worse."  
  
She looks at her fingers, complimenting herself on how stilly they lie, how they do not grip her clipboard.   
  
"I take it there's nothing you can do."  
  
The clipboard cuts into her fingers. "I don't know how much longer we're going to be able to insert an IV or a morphine drip. The exoskeleton is eating every inch of your skin."  
  
"I won't be able to move at all?"  
  
She shakes her head.  
  
"Well," he smiles, turning to look at her. "At least I won't be able to scream."  
  
She does not let herself throw her clipboard across the room.  
  
"I'd rather not wait," he says.  
  
  
Sitting in a white room dancing with rainbow light, she holds his hand until the end. The twisted edges of his fingers are sharp, and the reflections stay long after he is gone.  
  
*  
  
He is all pain and primaries, and they are not supposed to be here.  
  
He is supposed to be here, but she is not: here at the mansion, with hardwood floors and Renaissance paintings and those who take lives and fashion themselves heroes. In a place where harsh realities are traded for dreams, and people live and die for a mission without a plan.  
  
She is supposed to be here, but he is not: here at an operating table, with a bone scalpel between her fingers and a life in her hands. Blood on his skin and uniform and sweat in her eyes.  
  
He is supposed to be here, but the bomb inside him is not.   
  
She is supposed to be at Our Mother of Mercy, clinically clean and brightly lit and surrounded by white and the steady hum of monitors; but Bobby came and the Sentinels came and her scrubs are torn and dirty. There is a life before her (with something nestled between the glistening folds of his entrails) that could kill them all, and she does not have the tools she needs to save him. Just a bone knife and a makeshift operating table (hastily covered glass and steel above expensive wood grain they will surely never get the blood out of) and soft, warm, poor lighting.  
  
She looks at Scott. At his grimace because she doesn't have anesthetics or the ability to put him under, at the hard lines at his mouth and temples and the way the splattered fluids turn his blue and yellow uniform to a child's colour wheel.  
  
"There isn't enough time," she says, wiping the sweat from her forehead and smearing it with blood.  
  
He looks at her (she knows this though she cannot see his eyes) and sees right through her.  
  
Dr. McCoy, digging through another cupboard for another tool, turns to look at them.   
  
Scott gives the barest of nods, eyes only for her. She thinks she could have learned to like him. Through clenched teeth, he manages to speak. "Just -- could you take off..."  
  
She tries not to choke. It is not supposed to be like this, she thinks as the scalpel clatters to the ground, and she removes the ruby lenses from Scott's face.  
  
"Cecelia, what are you..." she hears McCoy say as she wraps her arms tight around Scott, and buries her face in his chest. McCoy wouldn't understand, and she all ready knows she needs to be the one to do the things he could never do. There is a second, an eon, while Scott's blood soaks her clothes and skin as she holds him as tightly as she can.  
  
Then her shields light up and the world explodes.  
  
*  
  
He is all viper eyes and starlit shadows, and he likes to watch.  
  
The rave has left enough of her to hate him for that.  
  
He sits, in a darkened corner, smoking a cigar and swirling ancient scotch while they have their way with her. This is how it is every time -- if she looks towards him all she will see is his hungry eyes, a refraction of light from his tumbler, and the release of a fresh spiral of smoke.  
  
Sometimes the men will tell her that she is beautiful. Sometimes they will whisper sweet nothings in her ear, to convince themselves that this is anything other than what it is. Sometimes they are hard and brutal and demanding, and he will still let them have their way. She does not mind if they bruise her, because it is something to feel other than the track marks up and down her arms.  
  
One night, a man with a track of teardrops tattooed down his cheek cups her face and tells her that she has beautiful hands. Surgeon's fingers. She scratches her nails down his back and when she lets him see something of what they can do now, she remembers something of what they could do then.  
  
There is nothing (and never is) anything so tawdry as a wad of cash on the dresser. Just a space of time where she stares up at the stars through the glass roof, and the man with the teardrop tattoos dresses and leaves. He kisses her lightly, on the mouth, and she lets him.   
  
Rarely does she let them kiss her.  
  
There is a stirring from the shadows in the corner, and she does not need to look to see the hungry eyes resolving into high cheekbones and neatly trimmed hair. He is beautiful, and she knows she must still be, too, or he would long since have found another girl to replace her.   
  
There are always more.  
  
There will always been more.  
  
All Armani suits, he sways through the shadows. Settles himself across the twisted sheets and kisses her. Doesn't ever care of whom or what she tastes.  
  
He gets to kiss her. He gets anything he wants.  
  
"Hush now," he says, though she has not made a sound. Wraps her fingers tight around a cool vial and unthreads his tie. Trails it up her bare skin from knee to shoulder, and finally ties it tight around her arm. "You never have to worry. Not as long as I'm here to look after you," he says, and then his lips are busy elsewhere.  
  
He expects his reward, after all.  
  
It's hard for her to find a good vein, with the dark and the track marks, but it was not so long ago that she was a doctor and since then she has had plenty of practice.  
  
This is the last time, she tells herself. As she tells herself every time, lying in soiled sheets and staring at the stars while hungry eyes devour her.  
  
This time will be the last, she tells herself as the rave hits her system and she loses all control. Arcs her back and screams as he buries his face in her chest and his neatly manicured fingernails dig into her hips  
  
Her shields flare up and it's all she needs -- the rush and the satisfaction and the *power* and the knowledge that she's safe. She's safe and it doesn't matter that her life was destroyed and destroyed again, and they left her behind after she took a life and never came looking for her.  
  
She is all that she needs.  
  
When she comes back to some semblance of herself, it is to a dead weight on her body and a neatly cauterized head rolling on the floor. The eyes are no longer hungry, but dumb with surprise. She shifts the weight on top of her and the hands fall from the remainder of the body.  
  
She laughs as she rolls out from under the pieces. Picks the head from the floor and places it neatly on a pillow. She arranges the rest of the pieces of his body artistically on the bed, and retrieves up her clothes from a pile on the floor.  
  
By the look in his eyes (the last look he'd ever give her and at least it was something but hungry) she wonders if he's as confused as she as to which one of them actually killed him.  
  
She laughs as she shuts the door behind her. If she hurries, she might be able to catch the man with the tearstained cheeks.  
  
  
*  
  
Everything is crystalline.   
  
Cold fingers trail along the back of her knees, sneak up below the hem of her dress. The wind, mocking her as she stares blankly (could she see) at the space where her stash should be.   
  
One foot is bare, numb to the shards of brick and glass she knows must litter the roof, because her foot is slippery when she places it down. Her hands, arms, so cold, and when she hugs herself to warm up she instead sets her body wracking with shivers. She buries her icicle fingers in her rough braids to stop their shaking, contain their touch, and they seem to slice through her skull.  
  
It hurts, but nothing like the need. The razor-edge of wanting and the knowing that if she can justjustjust it will all be okay. That the clamouring beast behind her eyes will curl contended at the base of her skull, sheath its claws and eat instead the pain that lances through her heart and bones.  
  
If only for a while.  
  
She screams up at the sky, knowing (could she see) its moon will hide behind the swirling diamond pinpricks. The jewels will (would) twinkle and shine, their refracted glow eating the night.  
  
Everything is crystalline but never crystal-clear, and she cannot see, cannot see, cannot find what she needs and she needs and she needs, and she needs...  
  
Blindly, she spins. Hears the coo and call of pigeons, the squeal of brakes and sounding of horns, the laugh of the stars. She is burning up from the inside out, as she scrambles across the roof, hands searching things that her mind does not let her identify. Thin, weathered rubber; something soft and squishy that may once have had fur; sticky, oily substances that cling to her hands as they scrape across broken brick and glass, shattered shards of tile and rough ends of wire.  
  
Then something cool and smooth, round. She almost shatters the vial when she places her hand on it, but brings it quickly to her chest and sobs. She is long beyond pretending that her hands don't shake, but she cannot see so can let herself make believe, just this once.   
  
She cannot see, but her desperate hands know the way and she will let herself believe that her fingers do not quiver as the slick coolness burns into a rush.   
  
The power and the rightness as all of her snaps into place, and she can see it.  
  
She can see it all.   
  
Every rock and tree, each brick in every building on the block. She sees the way they all fit together, interlocking and codependent. Fills in the spaces she does not see in her mind, until they are real enough for her to see as well.  
  
Spinning, she laughs. Pulses her shields in time with the song of the stars. She spins faster and faster and faster until it all blurs and she can no longer see that none see her, though she knows them all; and she falls to the cement with a cry.  
  
The rooftop is still littered with pieces of shingle and slate, covered liberally in dirt and refuse, and when she falls she tears open her knees, elbows, and the heel of her left hand.  
  
It is almost hypnotizing, the way her arms are laced with blood, down to the point where they hurt. She watches silently the way the redblackpurple trickles down her arms and hands, by her knees soaks the hem of her dress. The bloody is a heavy trail of numbness, but her elbows always hurt, along the forearms and wrists. She things she might know why, but the thought is lost, and she no longer cares about the small round wounds and faded bruises.  
  
The stars were calling her name, though she no longer remembers what it is. She lies with arms outstretched, and names them all in return. Draws in constellations across the night to suit her tastes. They are kind to her for a time, before they tire of her and mock her with their song. Spin in dizzying patterns to set her world a kilter, so she scrambles to her feet and yells at them.  
  
They ignore her protests so she hops up on the roof ledge. The closer she is, the more they'll have to listen to her. So she stands there and shakes her fist, and when they finally quiet she laughs in triumph. Spins with her arms wide open and catches her foot on a crack in the bricks that form the ledge.  
  
The street below looms up at her as she windmills her arms, trying to catch her balance.  
  
From below her, from the silent spinning street, the pieces of everything that she sees reach out for her. Now they want her. Now they need her. Now they see her. The trees and the spiders and the jaguars and all the people she's ever met. No longer leave her for the crows when she's killed for them, lost her life for them.  
  
Now they need her, reach and suffocate her, and she doesn't want them any more.  
  
She waves her arms frantically, trying to get back upright, but everything is reaching for her and everyone wants her, and her feet slip from the ledge, and she falls.  
  
She reaches for her shields and they flare up, burning bright and true and safe. She wraps them around herself tightly, and they flicker out. She maybe (always) knew it would come to this.  
  
She falls forever, until she thinks she'll never hit the ground. Rush of wind blocking out the mocking voices and stars spinning sedately above her.   
  
And falling, she does not care if she never truly saw.  
  
*  
  
He is a sculptor's dream of grief, with his shadowed eyes and bowed head; and he is much too young to be so grave.   
  
It is with a twinge that she realizes that not more than four years separate them, but the weight of her need ages her. Each minute that passes without the rave is another century, and she does not know how long it will be before she wears the lines of time on her face.   
  
He stands in the Professor's study, with his left hand on the leather spines of old books and his right wrapped tightly into a fist. There is a silver-framed picture of Moira and Xavier sitting on the desk, and he gazes at it with something in his eyes she cannot identify.  
  
"Hey," she says, gingerly stepping inside the study. He starts as if caught doing something wrong. As far as she knows, he isn't -- the study is open to all of the students, but she has been avoiding it. Xavier has enough on his mind that the drug addicted doctor he dragged into his world kicking and screaming doesn't even register (she never has) so she is doing her part for him and not reminding him.  
  
"How are you?" Colossus rumbles, looking at the picture once more and turning to her.  
  
She's strung out and she's tripping and she really, really needs a hit of rave or to hit something or scream or for someone to notice her. "I'm fine," is what she says. Because Moira is dead and Cecelia wasn't a priority even when she wasn't. "Can't sleep?"  
  
"Aye," he says, and heads for the door. "I was having troubles, but now seem to be feeling better."  
  
She leans back against the doorframe, sending a twisted shadow across the rectangle of light that spills in from the hall and across the carpet. Anyone else would have been able to fit through the remaining space, but even unpowered he is a large man. "Going straight to bed?" she asks.  
  
"I think I am ready for rest," he says gravely, and motions towards the door. "May I pass?"  
  
She stands aside, crosses her arms. "Not planning anything martyrical?" she asks as he passes her.  
  
He stops, and she is reminded again just how large he is. He could break her in half with one hand.   
  
"You see," Cecelia says. "If you're planning on a heroic, self-sacrificial death, you might want to clean up while you're gathering supplies. Kind of gives it away."  
  
"I will keep this in mind for the future," he says, and there is laughter in his eyes.  
  
"Colossus," she starts. "Don't, okay?"  
  
"Do not what?"  
  
"Don't be an idiot. You don't have to do this."  
  
He shakes his head. "You are a doctor. I do not need to tell you that when you balance one life against many, the lives of the many must always be preserved."  
  
"If one life is worth nothing, then multiplying it by a hundred thousand only gives you more zeros."   
  
"I may not have to do this," he says. "But someone will."  
  
She steps closer to him, bare feet cold on the hardwood floors. "Then let someone else," she says, ignoring the need in her veins.  
  
"Little one," he says, and all she can think is that he has no right to talk down to her.  
  
"Why you?" she asks. "Because you couldn't save your sister? It won't bring Illyana back, and it won't bring back Moira, and I know there are a hell of a lot of people who'd miss you." She glares at him, and tries not to let him see how she is burning away. "There are a lot of people who love you. Don't. Let it be someone else."  
  
"Let it be you?" he asks.  
  
She cannot understand how calm he is, how peaceful his eyes. "Why not?"  
  
"Because for me, it would not be the easy way out," he says. Kisses her chastely on the forehead. "And a hundred thousand times zero is still zero."  
  
  
  



End file.
